Discard Trope: Extranormal Prison

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Created By: aurora369 on January 6, 2013 Last Edited By: Tallens on August 14, 2013

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Extranormal Prison

For empowered criminals, but not empowered enough to warrant a Tailor Made Prison

Name Space:Main

Page Type:Trope

In most worlds where extranormal or paranormal powers exists, there are people who try to use them for personal gain, societal disruption or plain eeevil. These people should be isolated from society, but where exactly? A plain old Big House will be too easy to escape. A Tailor-Made Prison is the most reliable option, but it's overkill and too expensive to build one for every petty evil mage, dark space knight or dastardly super.

The solution? The golden mean, as usual. The Extranormal Prison is much more secure than any muggle prison, and it's specifically secure from extranormal powers of any inmates therein. It's large and versatile enough to contain many inmates with varying powers. Only the most important baddies will be too tough for this institution to contain, so they'll be put in a Tailor-Made Prison, or, if even this fails, sealed in a can.

However, The Empire can also acquire the know-how to build this sort of prisons. In this case, they'll be used to contain heroic empowered individuals. However, Imperial extranormal prisons are characterized by shoddy construction and lax security, so they are still Cardboard Prisons for the heroes.

Examples:

One Piece's great gaol Impel Down serves as this, as well as being a Hellhole Prison. It holds particularly notorious and dangerous criminals, with 5 different levels of hellish punishments. Meanwhile the secret level 6 qualifies more as a Tailor-Made Prison.

General Zod and his cronies are banished to the Phantom Zone in the 1978 Superman movie. The Phantom Zone is portrayed as an interdimensional wasteland with no hope of escape. Unless, of course, someone therein is needed by the plot, in which case, the Phantom Zone is a horrible vacation spot.

In Men in Black 3 there's a prison for alien criminals on the moon. The guards have futuristic technology, and the fact that escape means exposure to vacuum also helps.

Azkaban in the Harry Potter universe is a prison for evil wizards, guarded by the soul-sucking demetors.

In Myth-ing Persons, Aahz is arrested and imprisoned in a city of vampires. Because a normal jail cell can't hold a vampire, he's placed inside the mouth of an animated dragon-head statue, which can swallow a prisoner who tries to break free or inhale them if they turn into mist.

The Citadel from Star Wars: The Clone Wars was a prison built by the Republic to contain Dark Jedi and other Force-using criminals. The Separatists found that it's perfectly capable of holding good Jedi.

There were several prisons for benders in Avatar: The Last Airbender, built by the Fire Nation. They were built with precautions regarding the element the inmates were capable of bending: for example, a prison designed to hold earthbenders was built from iron over water, with nary a piece of earth in sight.

This cartoon has The Raft, a prison with three layers of security consisting of: all robot guards (no hostages), Power Nullifiersand having the whole prison shrunk to 1/60th scale, so escapees are still small.

Later on a second prison was built in the negative zone. Here, escape means you end up in the middle of (breathable) outer space.

Young Justice featured Belle Reve as a sort of prison for supervillains, where the inmates wear collars that inhibit their powers. The compound itself has extremely tight security, including walls not even Superman himself could break through.

Season One of Loonatics Unleashed housed super-powered criminals such as Mallory Mastermind and the Sagittarius Stomper in the Acmetropolis Prison, miles below ground in a bedrock bunker. Season Two moved many of these criminals to a prison satellite in orbit, adding Otto the Odd and Massive to the inmate roster.

In Myth-ing Persons, Aahz is arrested and imprisoned in a city of vampires. Because a normal jail cell can't hold a vampire, he's placed inside the mouth of an animated dragon-head statue, which can swallow a prisoner who tries to break free or inhale them if they turn into mist.

I guess Arkham Asylum from the Batman universe counts? It holds all sorty of supervillains, but most don't have any special cells. At least that's how it's depicted in the LEGO Batman games, with imprisonald villains like Bane or the Penguin just running round like any other inmate when they're not confined to their normal prison cells which are pretty ordinary.

Marvel Comics has used several over the years: the Vault, Seagate Prison, the Raft, and the Big House are all originally from the comics and appeared in roughly that order over the decades; the animated series simply used all of them. Additionally, the in-universe version of Ryker's Island (spelled differently than the real Riker's) has a special wing for supercriminals.

The Negative Zone prison, called 42 in the comics, comes from Civil War and was initially used to hold renegade heroes.

Young Justice featured Belle Reve as a sort of prison for supervillains, where the inmates wear collars that inhibit their powers. The compound itself has extremely tight security, including walls not even Superman himself could break through.

Note: I'm not familiar with Suicide Squad so could someone who is fill that in, as the YJ one is simply an adaptation of that.

Season One of Loonatics Unleashed housed super-powered criminals such as Mallory Mastermind and the Sagittarius Stomper in the Acmetropolis Prison, miles below ground in a bedrock bunker. Season Two moved many of these criminals to a prison satellite in orbit, adding Otto the Odd and Massive to the inmate roster.

I think many of these examples should be fleshed out quite a bit more. Most of them are written in the form "Prison X holds supernatural prisoners Y", but that much should be obvious just by reading the name of the trope.

General Zod and his cronies are banished to the Phantom Zone in the 1978 Superman movie. The Phantom Zone is portrayed as an interdimensional wasteland with no hope of escape. Unless, of course, someone therein is needed by The Plot, in which case, the Phantom Zone is a horrible vacation spot.

One Piece's great gaol Impel Down serves as this, as well as being a Hellhole Prison. It holds particularly notorious and dangerous criminals, with 5 different levels of hellish punishments. Meanwhile the secret level 6 qualifies more as a Tailor Made Prison.

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